The title for this essay comes from an inspiration the documentary “Punk’s Not Dead” by Susanne Dynner gave me. It proves that punks are indeed “not dead” and are demonstrated with various music genres in American culture. So if critics  declare Cyberpunk for dead, they will be surprised that there are many forces who try to prove them wrong. Creative Cyberpunk writers are out there, many surely still undiscovered, contemplating about mankind’s future relationship with science, technology, computers, robots and the lot. I will describe with the help of the following short advertisement about “Cybermobbing” or “Cyberbullying” that not only writers make precautions or warnings for the future.

“Werbung gegen Cybermobbing“

This advertisement produced by order of the European Union the  shows how a victim becomes insulted and bullied by hostile class mates in the cyberspace of the Internet. The degree of harm might be kept within a limit in this example. The threshold to “Cyberterrorism” is stunningly low, when people consider doing worse than bullying and aim to damage others on a much severer level. The extent of harm caused would be the only difference. It shows that even the government by taking measures to inform society, is aware of  the threat ruthless skilled computer users could do to political, social and economic entities. If punks roam the street and are up to no good people can call the police and get help in most situations. But cyberpunks don’t have to worry about “Internet” police trying to catch them. If skilled enough they could cause “cyber-mayhem” being invisible and leaving no trace.

In my opinion many crucial themes in Cyberpunk deal with mankind crossing borders in science and technology and not knowing the negative outcome it could have. Nearly every Cyberpunk story deals with the aftermath of terrible mistakes done by people who hold power, scientists ignoring ethnic condemnable questions or using advanced technology for a “bad” cause. It makes the issues Cyberpunk is about relevant to us, because as users  we can always make wrong decisions regarding the application of technology. Cyberpunk which does not always try to entertain can be seen as comments about the progress of science and technology when misused. As science fiction fans we could imagine serious Cyberpunk novelists as “Vulcans” trying to display and educate inexperienced humans about what might happen if you make the wrong decision at the wrong time.

Is Cyberpunk Dead? No. It is, in fact, alive and well, thank you very much. Has Cyberpunk evolved? Yes. It has indeed evolved. To look at this question more closely we need two things. A working definition of cyberpunk, and a work produced recently to prove that the genre is still alive and thriving. I will use Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother as an example of a successful modern day Cyberpunk novel. My definition of Cyberpunk I take directly from our Class Description and it is a definition that I assume was written by our fair teacher Rebecca Kahn:

“Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with marginalized people in technologically-enhanced cultural ‘systems’. In cyberpunk stories’ settings, there is usually a ‘system’ which dominates the lives of most ‘ordinary’ people, be it an oppressive government, a group of large, paternalistic corporations, or a fundamentalist religion. These systems are enhanced by certain technologies (today advancing at a rate that is bewildering to most people), particularly ‘information technology’ (computers, the mass media), making the system better at keeping those within it inside it. Often this technological system extends into its human ‘components’ as well, via brain implants, prosthetic limbs, cloned or genetically engineered organs, etc. Humans themselves become part of ‘the Machine’. This is the ‘cyber’ aspect of cyberpunk. However, in any cultural system, there are always those who live on its margins, on ‘the Edge’: criminals, outcasts, visionaries, or those who simply want freedom for its own sake. Cyberpunk literature focuses on these people, and often on how they turn the system’s technological tools to their own ends. This is the ‘punk’ aspect of cyberpunk””

Although, on the surface Little Brother may not appear to be Cyberpunk (it’s marketed as YA not SF or Cyberpunk). It really does fulfill all the requirements of the above definition. The reason that it may not seem cyberpunk at first glance is that it takes place in almost the present day. Most of the tech describes in the book exists. Some of the tech is even identified by a particular brand name or product name of something that is on the market and available to consumers right now. The rest of it is either stuff that exists, but not in the specific form that is described in the book, or is not at all hard to see being made four or five years from now. But the rest of the elements of Cyberpunk are there. There is an oppresive system, in this case the Department of Homeland Security, that infiltrates many of the lives of the people in the story. They operate a surveillance society where the DHS tracks everyones movements and everyones expenditures. People are stopped and questioned by the police if their “histograms” are non-standard. They take people off the street and wiretap the Internet. The main character of the story is a cyberpunk in the finest tradition. He is not really an anti-hero. Neo from the Matrix is not really an anti-hero either. The main character, Marcus Yallow, finds ways of using the DHS’s technology against them. He starts a techno-revolution that uses the same technology that the DHS is using to oppress people to liberate them.

Little Brother is not an older book like Neoromancer or Snow Crash, it was published last year. Furthermore, it was highly successful. It was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel. It got great reviews from several publications including the New York Times which named it as one of the best books for young people of the year. Does it look like classic cyberpunk? Not really. It is modern Cyberpunk. Today you don’t really need to invent a futuristic technology to write a cyberpunk story. You can use today’s tech just fine. That is not to say that you can’t write about futuristic technologies. There are plenty of stories that involve entoptic displays and bioware implants and nanobots. But in a few decades these may very well be real and commonplace technologies.

“Video Killed the Radio Star”

You’re probably wondering: what the hell does the song “Video killed the Radio star” written in 1979 by the British synthpop/New Wave group The Buggles have to do with death of Cyberpunk? The song celebrates the golden days of radio, describing a singer whose career is cut short by television. It’s nostalgic and quite poignant: the lyrics are directly referring to a period of technological change in the 1960′s, and “the desire to remember the past and the disappointment that children of the current generation would not appreciate the past“.

So how is this relevant to the question: Is Cyberpunk dead?

When we think of “classic” cyberpunk we think of the works of authors like Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Shiner, etc. we think of the dystopian, bleek visions of the future they depictied, we think of the personal, social, ethical and political questions that their works forced us to consider and struggle with. If cyberpunk has any epistemological value, then it lies here … it is that it showed us echoes of the real world, and through the vision of these writers and the world they showed us it felt as though “fiction” wasn’t that far away from “fact” that it could be real one day – and that scared us. That’s what drew us in to this genre … it’s what kept us there. Then as we grew older and the world around us changed we saw technologies advance, what was once fiction is now a reality: RFID, global surveillance, genetics, nano-technology, DRM (created and hacked ), botnets, viruses, the Patriot Act etc.

The visions those writers imagined now seem to be prophetic.

I think, therein lies the problem. When Gibson et al. were crafting vast visions of a massively connected global network ( the internet ),  where people could live out alternate lives forming relationships in a digital world ( think World of Warcraft, Second Life etc. ) to escape the real world with its social, economic, political problems, these things didn’t yet exist. Twenty or in some cases thirty years on these things are a reality, but much of the contemporary literature in this genre is still completely enamored of that golden age, so much so that its become cliched – touched upon here by Ben Iglauer in his essay “Cyberpunk Lives“:

In science fiction literature, many of the superficial conventions of cyberpunk had become cliched. Neurojacks, console cowboys, rebels on designer drugs, mirror shades and black leather, etc. had all been appropriated into boring, formula tales of detectives, cops, lone heros, and militarism. There was even a flurry of cyberpunk role playing games, which were not based on any particular work, but on the common devices of the genre as a whole: yakuza, implant weapons, mega-corporations– cool games, but not necessarily a sign of a vibrant and original literature.

It feels like we are living off past glories, rather that striving for new ones. It doesn’t feel like anyone has really come along in the last few years and really did something that pushed us further than we have already been. There are lots of new works out there, that are entertaining but nothing that feels like a real step change … cyberpunk was revolutionary once … it could be again.

I don’t think Cyberpunk is dead, I think the genre is waiting for someone to emerge to take the values and the culture that is cyberpunk and present a new generation with a vision of the future that is compelling and perhaps terrifying but crucially it is distinct enough from the visions presented to us in the past, so that when we read it we don’t immediately think Neuromancer or The Matrix, it forces us to ask some of the same questions but also new ones.

At this point the lyrics to the song seem relevant:

I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young it didn’t stop you coming through.

They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.

I met your children

What did you tell them?
Video killed the radio star.

Nayar, Pramod K., Wetware Fiction: Cyberpunk and the Ideologies of Posthuman Bodies. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1140647

Wall, David S., Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge about Cybercrime (July 3, 2008). Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 861-884, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1155155

Blitz, Marc Jonathan, The Freedom of 3D Thought: The First Amendment in Virtual Reality (October 28, 2008). Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 30, No. 3. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1291415

open access …. from california digital library eScholarship repository …

Richard Kahn. (2005). How the West was One? The American Frontier and the Rise of a Global Internet Imaginary. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 6.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol1/iss2/art6

Chris Newfield, “Nano-Punk For Tomorrow’s People” (March 1, 2006). Center for Nanotechnology in Society. Paper 22.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/isber/cns/22

Lorie Sauble-Otto (1997) “The Bodypolitics of Feminist Science Fiction: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s Le Silence de la cité”, Paroles gelées: Vol. 15: No. 2, Article 10.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucla_french/pg/vol15/iss2/art10

Janet Sarbanes (1996) “Literary Criticism after the Revolution, or How to Read a Polemical Postmodern Literary Text”, Paroles gelées: Vol. 14: No. 2, Article 12.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucla_french/pg/vol14/iss2/art12

Elizabeth Swanstrom. (2005). Wax Blocks, Data Banks, and File #0467839: The Archive of Memory in William Gibson’s Science Fiction. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 7.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol1/iss2/art7

William Warner, “Breaking the Code of The Matrix; or, Hacking Hollywood to Liberate Film” (September 1, 2002). Department of English, UCSB. Digital Cultures and New Media. Paper Warner2007b.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucsbenglish/digitalcultures/Warner2007b

Further forensic evidence … Cyberpunk’s not dead : Selective (2K-Present …) briancrime

Adam, Lynn Anne. Kathy Acker and the Hysterical Sublime: The Movements of Technological Martyrdom, Grotesque Perversity, and Post-Freudian Aesthetics., 2001.

Calvert, Bronwen, and Sue Walsh. “Speaking the Body: The Embodiment of ‘Feminist’ Cyberpunk.” Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations. Eds. Andy Sawyer and David Seed. Liverpool, England: Liverpool UP, 2000. 96-108.

Cole, David R. “Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk.” Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 27.2 (2005): 159-70.

Collins, Karen. “Dead Channel Surfing: The Commonalities between Cyberpunk Literature and Industrial Music.” Popular Music 24.2 (2005): 165-78.

Conn, Matthew. “The Cyberspatial Landscapes of William Gibson and Tad Williams.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 96 (2001): 207-19.

Dyens, Ollivier. “Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2.1 (2000): [no pagination].

Enteen, Jillana. “‘on the Receiving End of the Colonization’: Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Nansi Web.” Science Fiction Studies 34, no. 2 [102] (2007): 262-82.

Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2005. xxix, 2005.

Frelik, Pavel. “Return from the Implants: Cyberpunk’s Schizophrenic Futures.” Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media. Eds. Elisabeth (ed and introd ). Kraus and Carolin (ed and introd ). Auer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 87-94.

Gillis, Stacy. “Feminist Criticism and Technologies of the Body.” A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Eds. Gill (ed and introd ). Plain, Susan (ed and introd ). Sellers, and Susan (postscript) Gubar. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, xi, 2007. 322-335.

Grace, Dominick M. “From Videodrome to Virtual Light: David Cronenberg and William Gibson.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 44.3 (2003): 344-55.

Hardin, Michael. “Beyond Science Fiction: William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 30.4 (2000): 4-6.

Heuser, Sabine. “(En)Gendering Artificial Intelligence in Cyberspace.” Yearbook of English Studies 37.2 (2007): 129-45.

Hughey, Lynn. “Cyberpunk Pilgrimages: Kathy Acker Inside.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36.4 (2003): 121-37.

Kelly, James Patrick, and John Kessel. “Hacking Cyberpunk.” New York Review of Science Fiction 19, no. 12 [228] (2007): 1, 4-6.

Knight, Deborah, and George McKnight. “What is it to be Human? Blade Runner and Dark City.” The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film. Ed. Steven M. (ed and introd ). Sanders. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, viii, 2008. 21-37.

Kraus, Elisabeth. “Just Affix My Reality’: Pat Cadigan’s Constructions of Subjectivity.” Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media. Eds. Elisabeth (ed and introd ). Kraus and Carolin (ed and introd ). Auer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 107-121.

Krevel, Mojca. “Cyberpunk Literature and Slovenes: Too Mainstream, Too Marginal, Or Simply Too Soon?” Acta Neophilologica 33, no. 1-2 (2000): 69-77.

Leary, Timothy. “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David (ed and introd ). Bell and Barbara M. (ed and introd ). Kennedy. London, England: Routledge, xxv, 2000. 529-539.

Lohmann, Ingrid. “Cognitive Mapping Im Cyberpunk: Wie Jugendliche Wissen Über Die Welt Erwerben.” Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique 2.1 (2002): [no pagination].

McCallum, E. L. “Mapping the Real in Cyberfiction.” Poetics Today 21.2 (2000): 349-77.

Meier, Franz. “Neuromances/New Romancer: Cyberpunk and the Tradition of Romance.” Of Remembraunce the Keye: Medieval Literature and its Impact through the Ages. Ed. Uwe Böker. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 2004. 267-290.

Michaud, Thomas. “Science Fiction and Politics: Cyberpunk Science Fiction as Political Philosophy.” New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Eds. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, xii, 2008. 65-77.

Monnet, Livia. “Towards the Feminine Sublime, Or the Story of ‘A Twinkling Monad, Shape-Shifting Across Dimension’: Intermediality, Fantasy and Special Effects in Cyberpunk Film and Animation.” Japan Forum 14.2 (2002): 225-68.

Murphy, Graham J. “Penetrating the Body-Plus-Virtualisation in Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 34.95 (2005): 40-51.

Park, Chi Hyun. Orientalism in U. S. Cyberpunk Cinema from ‘Blade Runner’ to ‘the Matrix’., 2005.

Park, Jane Chi Hyun. “Stylistic Crossings: Cyberpunk Impulses in Anime.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 79, no. 3-4 (2005): 60-3.

Pitts, Victoria. “Feminism, Technology, and Body Projects.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 34, no. 3-4 (2005): 229-47.

Proietti, Salvatore. “The Informatic Jeremiad: The Virtual Frontier and US Cyberculture.” Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers. Eds. Karen (ed and introd ). Sayer and John (ed and introd ). Moore. Basingstoke, England; New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin’s, xiii, 2000. 116-126.

Rapatzikou, Tatiani G. Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2004. xxiv, 2004.

Säbel, Markus. “Cyberspace-Cyborg-AI: Technologie in William Gibsons Neuromancer.” Inklings: Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik 18 (2000): 250-71.

Schwetman, John D. “Romanticism and the Cortical Stack: Cyberpunk Subjectivity in the Takeshi Kovacs Novels of Richard K. Morgan.” Pacific Coast Philology 41 (2006): 124-40.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee, and Alvin Y. Wang. “Asians and Aliens in Cyberculture Film and Fiction.” Hybridity: Journal of Cultures, Texts and Identities 1.1 (2000): 17-29.

Senf Carol, A. “Teaching the Gothic and the Scientific Context.” Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. Eds. Hoeveler,Diane Long (ed.and introd.) and Tamar (ed and introd ). Heller. New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America, xiv, 2003. 83-89.

Shu-Shun Chan, Herbert. “Interrogation from Hyperspace: Visions of Culture in Neuromancer and ‘War without End’.” Simulacrum America: The USA and the Popular Media. Eds. Elisabeth (ed and introd ). Kraus and Carolin (ed and introd ). Auer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 136-145.

This week’s course asks whether or not cyberpunk has outgrown itself, and surpassed the realities imagined by some of the founders of the genre. Is it still relevant in the tech-saturated world in which we live? Have the warnings that were sounded by Gibson, Stephenson and Sterling become a reality? Is the technological reality in cyberpunk even that important, given how concerned the films and novels are with questions of truth, memory and reality? Much of the work read and discussed asks the question: What does it mean to be Human? Does this mean cyberpunk has a continued relevance as a genre?

With these questions, your reading and the discussions we have had over the past 3 weeks as a guide,  write a short (+/-2 page, complete with links and references) paper on how you see cyberpunk’s relevance as a genre, the debate on whether or not cyberpunk can be said to be ‘dead” and the epistemological issues it raises.   There are a great deal of resources online on this topic, so feel free to use any of them, as long as you refer back.

If you could upload your piece as a blog post by the end of the day on Monday 6th of October. That gives everyone the whole of Tuesday 7th to read, and then we can have our discussion on Wednesday 8th. Please tag your work as Week 4, Is Punk Dead and any other tags you think are appropriate.

Additional Resources:
These are just a starting point, but you may find them useful.
Cyberpunk RIP – an article by Paul Saffo in WIRED mag circa the early 1990s.
The Four Eras of Cyberpunk – article by Mr Roboto which defines the current era as “post-Matrix”

Pic by Enric Martinex on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0